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Cool and Collected

It’s one thing to love contemporary art; it’s another to live with it. So many new houses look like art galleries with furniture added, attesting to the fact that it isn’t easy to make a house with enough wall space for large-scale paintings and sculpture while still creating comfortable rooms.

Photo

The caplan houses central
gallery, with a stack of aluminum
boxes by Donald Judd, a painting by Andy Warhol
and sculptures by Martin Puryear
(on the wall) and Alan Saret (on the floor).
Credit
Nikolas Koenig

Jonathan Caplan, a New York architectural designer, struck an elegant balance between the two in this house in Baltimore, which he designed for his mother, Constance Caplan, an art collector and philanthropist who is on the board of the Dia Art Foundation. She wanted to have the bulk of her collection on display without building a separate gallery on the property as some collectors do. The issue was, as she put it, “how to make art a part of living.”

The four-bedroom, 7,000-square-foot house, which sits on seven acres in a residential neighborhood, does just that by seamlessly integrating generous spaces with intimate ones and punctuating a restrained palette of materials and colors with moments of unexpected warmth and exuberance. On the outside, the house sits low to the ground, its sleek walls of gray quartzite contrasting with its industrial-looking saw-toothed skylights. On the inside, a soaring central gallery space accommodates large works, like a stack of aluminum boxes by Donald Judd or a wall piece by Martin Puryear. The gallery opens onto the living and dining rooms at one end of the house and the bedroom wings at the other. A cool gray-and-white environment in the main rooms gives way to hits of intense color in more hidden places, like the powder room or the insides of closets and drawers. Contemporary furnishings are generally unobtrusive, except for the occasional show stopper, like the Zaha Hadid dining table or the acrylic-slab coffee table that Jonathan Caplan designed for the living room.

Photo

The house's entrance.Credit
Nikolas Koenig

Caplan, whose client list includes the artists Cecily Brown and Gary Hume, was concerned about what he calls “an unfortunate tradition of pitting art against its architectural surroundings,” specifically in contemporary art and architecture. He had no interest in an adversarial relationship — “It was not going to be me against the art,” he recalled — but neither was he going to sublimate his design to the point that the house became “another white cube.” Instead, Caplan took his inspiration from houses — of famous collectors like Henry Clay Frick and Sir John Soane — that later became museums. Their domestic origins add an intimacy to the experience of looking at great works of art and blur the lines between the house and the art.

Caplan translated these 19th-century inspirations into a Modernist formal vocabulary but stopped short of using the typical Modernist open-plan arrangement of rooms. He designed a series of staggered volumes, linked by generously proportioned doorways, that offer glimpses from one to the other. This arrangement creates not only more wall space for art but also more corner rooms, some with two or three exposures. Within each room, windows are placed to frame specific views of the landscape: one in the study, for instance, looks out at a Richard Serra sculpture on the front lawn.

The house’s humane rigor extended to the relationship between architect and client. When asked if designing for a parent made his job more difficult, Caplan said no. “Connie,” as he calls his mother, “never blurred the line between being a client and being a relative. She kept the roles quite distinct, which made everything straightforward — which is how she likes it and, maybe not coincidentally, how I like it.”